Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?

I believed “bear spray” was a metaphor for a gun. Eg if you were posting online about camping and concerned about the algorithm disliking your use of the word gun, were going into a state park which has guns banned, or didn’t want to mention “gun” for some other reason, then you’d say “bear spray”, since bear spray is such an absurd & silly concept that people will certainly understand what you really mean.

Turns out, bear spray is real. Its pepper spray on steroids, and is actually more effective than a gun, since its easier to aim and is optimized to blind & actually cause pain rather than just damage. [EDIT:] Though see Jimmy's comment below for a counter-point.

these might all be relatively obvious but here are some I've found nice to notice

• brain waves are actual waves of activation that pass through the brain edit: whoops, only partly true. spike trains are only one of the types of neural oscillation referred to by "brain waves"
• our neurons have actual literal weights, having more weight means having more stuff, physically. AI "weights" are named after that edit: this was misremembered, turns out the name origin is probably unrelated - it's only one of quite a number of connection gating mechanisms in the human brain, but dendritic spines do change thickness
• in relativity, spacetime is actually one thing. saying "space and time" is missing the point. though of course until we get a ToE unclear if that model is physically true - but it sure seems like a hint to me
• loud sounds are air smashing your ears [edit: unambiguously well established]
• "I didn't hear that" when people's low level processing fails to parse words someone said despite being perfectly able to receive the audio. not usually playing fool, in my experience [edit: first-hand empirical]

I used to think "getting lost in your eyes" was a metaphor, until I made eye contact with particularly beautiful woman in college and found myself losing track of where I was and what I was doing.

"Seeing the light" to describe having a mystical experience. Seeing bright lights while meditating or praying is an experience that many practitioners have reported, even across religious traditions that didn't have much contact with each other.

One's heart skipping a beat. I thought it was just a poetic way of saying something like "time stood still,"  but no, it turns out it does do that pretty literally.

On the opposite end, when I was young I learned about the term "Stock market crash", referring to 1929, and I thought literally a car crashed into the physical location where stocks were traded, leading to mass confusion and kickstarting the Great Depression. Though if that actually happened back then, it would have led to a temporary crash in the market.

When I visited Manhattan, I realized that "Wall Street" and "Broadway" are not just overused clichés, but the names of actual streets (you can walk on them!)

This feels closely related to Alexithymia or emotion blindness

Extremely common in: people with ADHD / Autism (potentially over half)

Fairly common in: people who have PTSD, people with substance abuse issues (possibly causal, alexithymia -> drugs to feel something), and men (male-normative alexithymia)

People with alexithymia often identify their emotions primarily through physical sensations

For me (a male with autism, ADHD and PTSD) I can tell I'm feeling scared or anxious if my legs get cold (I believe this is a common form)

For most forms of exercise (cardio, weightlifting, HIIT etc.) there's a a spectrum of default experiences people can have from feeling a drug-like high to grindingly unpleasant. "Runner's high" is not a metaphor, and muscle pump while weightlifting can feel similarly good. I recommend experimenting to find what's pleasant for you, though I'd guess valence of exercise is, unfortunately, quite correlated across forms.

Another axis of variation is the felt experience of music. "Music is emotional" is something almost everyone can agree to, but, for some, emotional songs can be frequently tear-jerking and for others that never happens.

My example is when people say "I enjoy life" they mean actually enjoying life-as-whole and not like "I'm glad my life is net-positive" or whatever.

Feeling pain after hearing a bad joke. "That's literally painful to hear" is self-reportedly (I say in the same way I, without a mind's eye, would say about mind's-eye-people) actually literal for some people.

If I’ll probably see them again, I don’t miss people. I thought people saying they miss you were just being overly polite.

I also was kind of surprised when it turned out 'gut feeling' actually meant a feeling in your belly-area.

Added: I wonder if the notion of 'having a hunch' comes from something that causes you to hunch over?

At a party several years ago an attractive intoxicated person made a pass at me unexpectedly. As a long time married, this isn’t something that happens. At that moment it literally felt like my knees fell out from under me. It was so unlike any other sensation! Im convinced it must have been “weak in the knees”.

I wrote about my own experience discovering “feelings in the body” here

When I first had depression, I remember thinking everything felt dull, like all the color was sucked out of the world, but I thought this was a metaphor even in my own mind.  But then I learned from this post that probably my color perception actually was messed up by depression https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-theory-of-depression/ 

A few people referred to anaxithemia or overcoming it, I think most people don't realize how precise most expressions around feelings are.

"My arms are falling" is an expression in french to explain that you're shocked. I experienced myself my arms becoming impossible to move, as if filled with concrete, after going through some relational shocks (the same is true of "being blinded by X", some extremely intense emotions have literally made me blind for a few secs)

While I'm at it, some mental shocks literally feel like a physical shock! One of those felt for me like an egg being broken against my skull.

"Making nodes in one's head" means overthinking something. "Untying things" means getting helpful insights. However, it's literally what I went through during therapy. There is a literal feeling of untying an invisible "force field", and those nodes are almost always correlated with mental schemes that are uselessly complex. Some people are genuinely worried that you could actively harm your own mental health through overthinking, they're not just finding an excuse for switching topics!

"Vibes" and "vibe" are extremely concrete things for people who got into very special states of consciousness. The french equivalent for that, "ondes", felt so radio-communication related I thought it had to be some telepathy pseudoscience BS. Actually, people are talking about components of subjective perceptions, and some of those (e.g. color, or mood) literally feel/behave like waves when under altered consciousness, and engage in resonance effects as well. To the detriment of the image, however, there seems to be a real contingent that extends this observation to "and we can use them to do telepathy or influence fate".

Sorry, I'm being very pedantic, but how are "picturing" and "mind's eye" not metaphorical? It's not like there's an actual picture or an actual eye anywhere, in fact that's the whole point

↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2024-11-21T20:40:59.804Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There is (for me) an actual experience of a picture. It seems only slightly metaphorical to call the faculty of experiencing such pictures “seeing” by an “eye”.

One test for the possession of such a faculty might be to count the vertexes of some regular (not necessarily Platonic) polyhedron, given only a verbal description.

Replies from: Ppau, robo

↑ comment by Ppau · 2024-11-21T21:45:30.319Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I didn't know about that test! Pretty neat, and it seems better than the "color of the apple" one

To be clear I am not pushing back on the notion of aphantasia, although I'm not necessarily a fan

And I don't think I have aphantasia

My point was more about metaphors, and about the fact that much more of our communication relies on them than we realize

Replies from: Richard_Kennaway

↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2024-11-21T22:39:32.479Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

That's not an official test, just something I thought up!

↑ comment by robo · 2024-11-22T18:55:12.529Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

...I do not believe this test.  I'd be very good at counting vertices on a polyhedron through visualization and very bad at experiencing the sensation of seeing it.  I do "visualize" the polyhedra, but I don't "see" them.  (Frankly I suspect people who say they experience "seeing" images are just fooling themselves based on e.g. asking them to visualize a bicycle and having them draw it)

Replies from: Richard_Kennaway, Kaj_Sotala, mr-hire, UnexpectedValues

↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2024-11-22T21:10:14.609Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What distinction are you making between "visualising" and "seeing"?

I've heard of that study about drawing bicycles. I can draw one just fine without having one before me. I have just done so, checked it, and every detail (that I included — this was just a two-minute sketch) was correct. Anyway, if people are as astonishingly bad at the task as the paper says, that just reflects on their memory, not the acuity of their mind's eye. I expect there are people who can draw a map of Europe with all the country borders, whereas I probably wouldn't even remember all of the countries.

Replies from: UnexpectedValues, robo

↑ comment by Eric Neyman (UnexpectedValues) · 2024-11-22T22:08:22.598Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Oh, that's a good point. Here's a freehand map of the US I drew last year (just the borders, not the outline). I feel like I must have been using my mind's eye to draw it.

↑ comment by robo · 2024-11-23T00:58:44.135Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

What distinction are you making between "visualising" and "seeing"?

Good question!  By "seeing" I meant having qualia, an apparent subjective experience.  By "visualizing" I meant...something like using the geometric intuitions you get by looking at stuff, but perhaps in a philosophical zombie sort of way?  You could use non-visual intuitions to count the vertices on a polyhedron, like algebraic intuitions or 3D tactile intuitions (and I bet blind mathematicians do).  I'm not using those.  I'm thinking about a wireframe image, drawn flat.

I'm visualizing a rhombicosidodecahedron right now.  If I ask myself "The pentagon on the right and the one hiding from view on the left -- are they the same orientation?", I'll think "ahh, let's see...  The pentagon on the right connects through the squares to those three pentagons there, which interlock with those 2/4 pentagons there, which connect through squares to the one on the left, which, no, that left one is upside-down compared to the one on the right -- the middle interlocking pentagons rotated the left assembly 36° compared to the right".  Or ask "that square between the right pentagon and the pentagon at 10:20 above it <mental point>.  Does perspective mean the square's drawn as a diamond, or a skewed rectangle, weird quadrilateral?" and I think "Nah, not diamond shaped -- it's a pretty rectangular trapezoid.  The base is maybe 1.8x height?  Though I'm not too good at guessing aspect ratios?  Seems like I if I rotate the trapezoid I can fit 2 into the base but go over by a bit?"

I'm putting into words a thought process which is very visual, BUT there is almost no inner cinema going along with those visualizations.  At most ghostly, wispy images, if that.  A bit like the fleeting oscillating visual feeling you get when your left and right eyes are shown different colors?

Replies from: Richard_Kennaway

↑ comment by Richard_Kennaway · 2024-11-23T11:26:58.497Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Good question! By "seeing" I meant having qualia, an apparent subjective experience. By "visualizing" I meant...something like using the geometric intuitions you get by looking at stuff, but perhaps in a philosophical zombie sort of way?

I have qualia for imagined scenes. I'm not seeing them with my physical eyes, and they're not superimposed on the visual field that comes from my physical eyes. It's like they exist in a separate three-dimensional space that does not have any particular spatial relationship to the physical space around me.

↑ comment by Kaj_Sotala · 2024-11-24T09:27:42.524Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I have a friend with eidetic imagination who says that for her, there is literally no difference between seeing something and imagining it. Sometimes she's worried about losing track of reality if she were to imagine too much.

↑ comment by Matt Goldenberg (mr-hire) · 2024-11-23T01:39:42.257Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

No, people really do see it, that whispiness can be crisp and clear

I'm not the most visual person. But occasionally when I'm reading I'll start seeing the scene. I then get jolted out of it when I realize I don't know how I'm seeing the words as they've been replaced with the imagined visuals

Replies from: romeostevensit

↑ comment by romeostevensit · 2024-11-24T07:20:34.686Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

+1 it took a while as a child before I came to understand that reading a book and watching a movie were meaningfully different for some people.

Replies from: UnexpectedValues

↑ comment by Eric Neyman (UnexpectedValues) · 2024-11-24T08:29:36.663Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It took until I was today years old to realize that reading a book and watching a movie are visually similar experiences for some people!

↑ comment by Eric Neyman (UnexpectedValues) · 2024-11-22T19:33:50.923Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I think very few people have a very high-fidelity mind's eye. I think the reason that I can't draw a bicycle is that my mind's eye isn't powerful/detailed enough to be able to correctly picture a bicycle. But there's definitely a sense in which I can "picture" a bicycle, and the picture is engaging something sort of like my ability to see things, rather than just being an abstract representation of a bicycle.

(But like, it's not quite literally a picture, in that I'm not, like, hallucinating a bicycle. Like it's not literally in my field of vision.)

Replies from: michael-roe

↑ comment by Michael Roe (michael-roe) · 2024-11-25T17:04:40.909Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

To add to the differences between people:

I can choose to see mental images actually overlaid over my field of vision, or somehow in a separate space.

The obvious question someone might ask: can you trace an overlaid mental image? The problem is registration - if my eyes move, the overlaid mental image can shift relative to an actual, perceived, sheet of paper. Easier to do a side by side copy than trace.

"Home is where the heart is."

I thought this meant something like home is where longing is (your metaphorical heart), the place that you yearn for the most. Now I think it may simply mean that home is wherever your physical beating heart is. The message behind it being that you can adapt to feel at home most anywhere.

"Breathtaking."

I thought this was just an expression to explain natural beauty but I actually felt the breath leave me when I was young from suddenly seeing a sweeping vista of mountains and forest while riding on a bus when I was a teen.